


Pancakes, and the everyday magical properties of the sharing thereof

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: 5 Times, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Feels, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Mention of canonical minor character death, Pancakes, Steve McGarrett Deserves Nice Things, danny's pancakes are the very best there ever were (according to steve)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-28 19:14:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19400620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: Steve has a snappy response to Danny all ready to go, but he promptly forgets what it was when Grace pushes her plate in his direction. She does it with a tiny, serious line between her eyebrows and the air of someone who is making a sacrifice, but is happy to do so because it’s for a good cause. “If you want, you can have the last one, Uncle Steve.”He looks at the pancake, and then at her, and then back at the pancake because he’s embarrassingly close to tearing up, all of a sudden, which is just not something he does.Or: Five times Steve shared pancakes with someone.





	Pancakes, and the everyday magical properties of the sharing thereof

**Author's Note:**

> What do I have way too many of? WIPs. What do I do on the day that I firmly told myself I’d finish at least one of those? Write a new fic. 
> 
> BUT, on the happier side of things, it was worth it, because ever since 9.13 and 9.15 writing a truly pancake-centered fic for this fandom has been an item on my bucket list, so at least I can now cross that off! Besides, it was SO MUCH FUN. This fic is half fluff, half food, and all sugary, syrupy sweetness. 🥞
> 
> I think I probably absorbed some of the egg-related thoughts in this from [msbeeinmybonnet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beeinmybonnet) (or on [Tumblr](https://msbeeinmybonnet.tumblr.com/), where those thoughts would have come from). All hail her intricately crafted headcanons. ❤

“You’re early,” Danny says, when he opens the door of his latest slightly crappy apartment for Steve. “Grace is still finishing up breakfast.”

“Maybe you’re just late,” Steve shoots back nonsensically, as he breezes past Danny. Grace is at the small dinner table in the kitchen area, working her way through the last two of what probably once was a whole stack of pancakes. He bumps her tiny fist in greeting as he slides into a seat, and then he points at her plate. “Did your dad make those?”

Grace’s pigtails bounce a little when she nods. “Danno’s pancakes are the best. They have chocolate chips and bananas.”

Steve lowers his head and raises his eyebrows to show just how impressed he is. “Chocolate chips _and_ bananas? Wow, that sounds delicious.” And unhealthy, but Grace’s metabolism can probably take it. She’s young.

“And he buttered them for me,” Grace continues happily. She has another bite ready to go as soon as the words are out.

“Danno’s such a great dad.” He doesn’t really mean for that to be sarcastic, because Danny is, very obviously, a great dad. He just doesn’t intend for it to sound as brutally honest as it does, either. 

Danny, who has followed Steve over from the door and is now leaning on one the last two empty dining chairs, takes the praise with equanimity. “Hey, that’s one of the first smart things you’ve said all week.”

“I have my moments.”

Danny must be in a good mood today, because he graciously refrains from rolling his eyes. He reaches out to flick one of Grace’s pigtails back over her shoulder. “Better eat up, Monkey. You’ll need it if this crazy guy is going to drag us all over the zoo today.”

In actuality, Steve thinks it’s more likely Grace is going to be dragging them around, because she usually has a pretty strong idea of what she wants and has never been afraid to assert that will. He’s smiling at her pancakes for no good reason when she suddenly says, “Do you want to try some, Uncle Steve?”

He’s already had breakfast, and a much healthier one, but to his own surprise, he finds he is curious. “Can I?”

Grace grins at him. “Of course.” She cuts a generous piece out of the pancake she’s finishing up, and Steve takes it with thumb and index finger, careful not to drip syrup on the table.

He makes a shocked noise while he chews that’s not even entirely for show, but out of respect for Danny’s attempts at teaching Grace table manners, he swallows before he speaks. “These are actually really good.” That could be an understatement. They’re very possibly the best pancakes Steve has ever had, and he doesn’t even like chocolate that much.

“Of course they are,” Danny grouses. “I made them. Don’t sound so surprised.”

Steve licks his fingers to get the syrup off, but they remain slightly sticky. “I remember your eggs, Danny.”

“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with my eggs. It’s not my fault you’re a barbarian who prefers the torture that’s a scramble with only dry egg whites.”

Steve has a snappy response to Danny all ready to go, but he promptly forgets what it was when Grace pushes her plate in his direction. She does it with a tiny, serious line between her eyebrows and the air of someone who is making a sacrifice, but is happy to do so because it’s for a good cause. “If you want, you can have the last one, Uncle Steve.”

He looks at the pancake, and then at her, and then back at the pancake because he’s embarrassingly close to tearing up, all of a sudden, which is just not something he does. “I can’t accept that, Gracie. It’s yours. Danno made them for you.”

“That he did,” Danny confirms.

“But if it’s mine, then I get to give it away if I want,” Grace reasons. She’s far too smart for her own good. “I think you’ll enjoy it more.”

Steve steals a look at Danny, who shrugs. 

“Okay,” Steve says. “How about this?” He pulls the plate a little closer and takes Grace’s knife. He cuts a neat line down the middle of the last surviving pancake. “We share.” 

Grace beams. “Okay. Thank you, Uncle Steve.”

“Sharing is caring,” Danny jokes, but when Steve looks up, he’s offering Steve a fork with a fond look in his eyes.

*

After Malia dies, Steve spends a lot of time with Chin in all night diners. If anyone ever asks, he’s just there because he can’t sleep anyway, and he needs good coffee and it’s nice to have the company. Chin probably doesn’t buy any of those excuses, because he’s a top rate detective and a very sharp man, but he also never presses Steve on any of it, and so they sit and drink coffee and occasionally talk about nothing specific. 

Mostly, though, they read. This time, Chin is engrossed in a book – something by Terry Pratchett, which must be exceptional because it makes the corners of Chin’s mouth twitch every handful of minutes, and Chin hasn’t been amused by much lately – but Steve only brought a newspaper, and he’d misjudged how much time it would take him to get through it. He starts studying the diner menu for lack of any more stimulating reading material, and his eye catches on something that has the corners of his own mouth stubbornly tugging upwards.

“Hey,” he says to Chin, “want to share some pancakes?”

Chin looks up from his book questioningly. “Pancakes?”

“Banana chocolate chip. I wanna try them.”

Chin quirks an eyebrow, but then he inclines his head. “Sure. I could go for some pancakes.”

Steve flags down the waitress and orders, and before long she returns to top off their coffee cups and put a huge, syrup-slathered plate in front of them, complete with two knives and two forks. “Bon appétit,” Steve says, as he digs in.

Chin polishes off his half of the plate silently. After he’s put down his fork, he leans back in the booth and really smiles for the first time in a while that Steve knows of. “That was actually a really great idea.”

Steve grins back around his last two bites. “Yeah. Good food.” 

Not as good as Danny’s, but he keeps that to himself for now.

*

The first time Steve and Charlie meet is at the hospital. The second is nothing more than a hello in passing when he’s just leaving Danny’s place while Rachel is dropping off the kids – plural now, all of a sudden, which is why he can’t really look at Rachel without wanting to smash something – and the third is at the hospital again, because Charlie is spending far too much of his young life in those sterile halls.

The fourth is at a diner for a late breakfast. It was Steve’s suggestion, because he wants to get to know Danny’s second kid better and due to the circumstances, he’s been seeing way less of Danny and Grace than he’s used to. He needs his fix. 

It’s not the same diner where he whiled away so many dark hours with Chin, because he looked for something a little more family-friendly this time. All the surfaces are impeccably non-sticky, there are a lot of people in Hawaiian shirts with cameras in one hand and little kids with sunburn across their noses clinging to the other, and there’s a separate children’s menu that has a coloring picture on the back. It shows a family of cartoon crabs on holiday, which Charlie fills in with bright blues and oranges while Grace aids him by turning the dolphin that waves hello from the sea pink with green dots, like Danny’s socks of the day.

By the time their food arrives, Charlie is drawing an oval-shaped sun in the sky with spiky yellow rays that come frighteningly close to earth. He’s been engrossed in his work for a while now, but when Danny gently but firmly takes the crayons away from him and there’s a plate put in front of him instead, it seems to come rushing back to him where he is and how many strangers there are around him, of which Steve guesses he’s probably one. Charlie retreats back into his shell a little. He quietly picks at his waffles, which look very good topped with whipped cream and fresh strawberries, but he keeps staring at Steve’s buttered, syrupped blueberry pancakes. 

Steve caves the second he realizes what’s going on. “Wanna try some of what I ordered, buddy?”

Charlie’s eyes shoot up from Steve’s plate to his face. He looks guilty and a little intimidated. “Don’t know,” he says, giving the dictionary’s entry for _timid_ a fitting definition, but the longing oozes even from those two words.

“It’s okay.” Steve scoops the top two cakes from his stack and deposits them on Charlie’s plate, in the tiny corner freed up by Charlie’s mouse-sized bites of his waffles. Steve steals one of those in return, because there’s no way all of that food will fit into Charlie’s tiny body, and Charlie looks at him with wide eyes. “You okay with this trade?” Steve asks him.

Charlie looks at the pancakes that are now on his plate, and he smiles, very suddenly and very brightly. “Yes. Thank you.”

“Sharing is caring,” he tells Charlie sagely, who doesn’t respond because his mouth is stuffed.

Steve digs into his newly acquired waffle and pointedly ignores the knowing, amused looks that not only Danny is sending him, but also Grace.

* 

Steve’s a little surprised when Grace and Charlie are the ones letting him into Danny’s house. He didn’t expect to find either of them here today, because Danny’s text had just asked if he was free for breakfast, and usually he’d mention the kids as extra enticement if he had them. 

“It’s a special day,” Grace explains cryptically.

That doesn’t mean a whole lot to Steve until he’s reached Danny, who is sitting at the dining table in the back of the room with an empty plate in front of him. Danny is leaning back in his chair, like he’s resting after a good meal, and he gestures for Steve to take a seat across the table. “The kids made Father’s Day pancakes,” he says. “They saved some for you, because they know how much you love them.”

The ambiguity of that sentence doesn’t slip by Steve unnoticed. He sits down hard on the chair that Charlie pulls out for him. “That’s some really great service there, kid,” he says, because it’s easier than trying to grasp what all of this is making him feel. 

He watches as Grace appears from the kitchen, which she’d apparently ducked into, with a plate and a sizable glass of orange juice. She puts both in front of Steve. “For you, Uncle Steve.”

“I stirred the chocolate chips and bananas into the batter,” Charlie announces proudly. “And I did the syrup.”

In front of him, Steve has an enormous stack of pancakes in slightly varying sizes and degrees of goldenness. It’s not just slathered, but absolutely drenched in syrup. He stares at it, and then he scoots back his chair with enough urgency that he almost topples the orange juice, because he needs to create enough room to drag both Grace and Charlie into his arms for a tight hug.

When he lets go of them, he digs into his food with relish. “Hmmm,” he hums, looking right at Danny. “These are the best pancakes I’ve ever had.”

“They’d better be,” Danny throws back. “The kids followed my special recipe.”

That explains a little of why they might _actually_ be among the best pancakes Steve has had. Not that it matters much one way or the other, because he’d be praising them into the heavens regardless. They could taste like soggy cardboard and he would still make sure to lick the plate.

“Hey, Uncle Steve?” Charlie’s voice sounds pitiful and he’s hooked his arms and chin on the edge of the table. He has a clean plate, which he’s pushing incrementally closer towards Steve, and he’s pouting a little, his eyes wide even as he’s giving the pancakes pointed looks. It’s a giant act as sure as the sun rises every morning, but Steve still feels a pang.

But Steve can act too, so he pouts right back. “What is it, little Charles?”

“Sharing is caring, Uncle Steve,” Charlie says, almost accusingly.

Grace is leaning against the table, and she’s not giving him the same pleading eyes, but her look is definitely imploring. “We worked very hard to make you those, you know, and we could only have a couple of them because we gave the rest to Danno and you.” 

Steve deliberately takes an extra large bite and chews obnoxiously. “And I’m very grateful for that.” 

Charlie narrows his eyes. Grace folds her arms.

Steve holds out for another second or two, but then he takes Charlie’s plate and starts cutting into his own stack of pancakes. “Grace, get yourself a plate too and get in here, before your brother hoovers them all up.” 

As he’s divvying up the pancakes, a foot nudges his under the table. Danny’s socked toes come to rest against his bare ankle, and stay there, as the kids fill the room with laughter and eat a third each of Steve’s pancakes because apparently Danny wouldn’t let them have any of his, and they preyed on Steve because they knew he’d be a soft touch. He can’t find it in him to care, because it’s all worth it just for Charlie’s loud smacking noises alone.

*

Steve has always been something of an unintentional cover hog. Everyone he’s ever shared a bed with has told him so – Catherine, Lynn, his sundry one night stands, and even Mary that one time they visited aunt Deb on the mainland as kids. It’s why, even when Danny manages to slip out of bed for some three AM bladder relief completely unnoticed, he always wakes Steve up eventually. 

“C’mon, babe,” Danny’s voice cajoles. “Give me a little to work with, here.”

There’s an insistent tugging on the blanket that Steve is both cuddling and has wrapped around his legs. Danny can’t have been gone for more than a couple of minutes, but Steve knows he works quickly even when unconscious. He opens his eyes just a slit to watch Danny struggle and benevolently decides to share his blanket, which makes him think of something he could ask for in return. “Hey,” he whispers, as the dark Danny-form breathes a sigh of relief and lies down, “wanna share some pancakes in the morning?” 

Danny stops securely arranging the covers around himself to stare at Steve, even though there’s no way he can see much more than Steve does, which is mostly shapes. “What is this, some weird fetish I accidentally trained into you?” 

“No.” Steve takes advantage of Danny’s temporary lack of movement to hook one of his legs around Danny’s. The hair on Danny’s calf rasps against his own. “Sharing is caring, remember?”

Danny’s laugh is quiet, but Steve can feel it, in the shaking of the mattress. “Yeah, love you too, doofus.”

Steve lets the warmth of that wash over him. He takes a moment to revel in it, before he has to ask, just to be a smartass, “Enough for chocolate chips and bananas?” 

“Enough that I won’t even make fun of you for having the exact same taste in pancakes as my preschooler.”

Steve’s not in the least bit offended by that. Charlie is an awesome preschooler. Besides, he knows Danny’s claim doesn’t hold water, because he’s got insider info. “Grace likes them too.”

Danny probably accepts this as an argument he’s losing, because he snuggles into his pillow in a way that feels demonstrative even in the dark. “Go to sleep, pancake monster.”

Steve does, still thinking of bananas and chocolate chips and syrup. He has unusually sweet dreams that night.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments are almost as awesome as Danny's pancakes. 🥞❤
> 
> I'm on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


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